The Gender Blog

One day during the first of my trips to Goa last year, I found myself improvising a map of the world with a balloon and then drawing a map of India in the sand with a stick; I was trying to show some of the children at Rainbow House where Goa is in relation to other parts of India and also in relation to the rest of the world.

Renuka was both puzzled and fascinated as to how England could be so far away AND in a different time zone,  so we used a second balloon to show the sun, and how it moves around the world, making it dark in England when it’s sunny in India and so on.  By the time of my second trip,  I was far better prepared and arrived with a case full of far more useful things for the children: underwear, hairbands, hairbrushes – and an atlas and an inflatable globe.  
Here’s Jyoti, the sixteen year old girl sponsored by my friend Diane, pointing to California.

I’m already planning my return trip for later this year and am far more wised up as to what to take Renuka (anything red) and what she does and doesn’t like (for the latter: anything “girly”, pink or that requires her to sit still) and also what the El Shaddai team would find useful to have as donations.

So the arrival of TV presenter Kate Humble’s new venture,  a website called Stuff Your Rucksack , struck a definite chord with me.  Her mantra,  based on her travels in the developing world is “if only I’d known before I came away” and she says:

“I’ve done a lot of travelling in the developing world through my job and I’d get to a school or an orphanage and they wouldn’t have something very simple like maps or exercise books. I used to kick myself because invariably these were things lying around at home that I could easily have stuffed in my own rucksack.”

Kate has hit on the fact that many people,  like me,  visit places around the developing world and want to do, or bring, the right thing, but are hamstrung by their lack of local knowledge and wary of, as she puts it,  ”dumping unwanted gifts on local communities”.  So she has developed a website with a map where,  if you click on a specific country,  you can link to local projects and find a list of what the people who work on the ground would find most useful.

Here,  for a great and very personal example,  is a link to one of El Shaddai’s shelters, where we can see  that they’d find it useful to be gifted toiletries, books and educational DVDs.

Fabulous work, Kate – pack a bag,  change a life.

Last week,  I had a very interesting meeting with the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women (CBFfW), a relatively new charity set up by barrister Cherie Blair, which aims to strengthen the capacity of women entrepreneurs in countries where they lack equal opportunities,  thus enabling them to grow their businesses and become greater contributors to their economies.

The Foundation aims to offer women better access to business development support networks and finance in areas of the world which include India, Israel, Kenya, Malawi and Palestine.

The CBFfW is now launching  their Mentoring Women in Business Pilot and if you’d like to be a Mentor … read on.

The 10-month pilot programme will support women entrepreneurs in Bangladesh, India, Israel and Palestine through mentoring. Approximately 30 entrepreneurial women will be mentored by 40 successful entrepreneurs or professionals. The pilot aims to demonstrate that there are measurable and tangible benefits from partnering women with entrepreneurial potential in developing and transition countries with successful Mentors in the UK using Google’s online applications such as Sites, Docs, Chat and Gmail. The pilot will involve testing exciting new formats and applications, so the Foundation is  looking for Mentors who are willing to be at the forefront of the development of this extraordinary international programme.

Being a Mentor is a great opportunity to share your knowledge and experience while helping others to succeed and learn about other cultures, places, businesses and market opportunities. Your participation in the Mentoring Women in Business Pilot will require a minimum of one hour of your time every two weeks, and the more you engage,  the more you will help shape the future of the Mentoring Programme.  Some of the Mentors applying for the pilot will be matched with a Mentee by July and will be able to start the mentoring relationship right away, while others will be matched in October, when a second group of Mentees will be ready to participate in the programme. Some Mentors will not be matched with a Mentee, but their involvement in the programme will be crucial for the successful management of the mentoring Platform, as they will be able to contribute to the public forums and share their expertise with Mentors and Mentees alike. The pilot phase will finish in May 2011.

Mentors are asked to provide a minimum donation of £100 per year to help support the programme and will be given training from Google on how to use Google’s applications and from renowned experts, Clutterbuck Associates and the Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning, Cambridge Judge Business School, on how to develop a strong and effective mentoring relationship. The one-day training course for the Mentors will be on July 14^th (it’s free) and will be a great opportunity to learn new skills and to network with like-minded people.

The Platform built with Google to run the Mentoring Women in Business Programme is now ready; if you would like additional information or have any questions, you can contact the programme’s project manager via gc@cherieblairfoundation.org

If, having browsed the site, you’d like to apply to become a Mentor, please apply now, as the the application deadline is 23^rdJune.

And please feel free to share this link with anyone who you think would be a great mentor for these women around the world.

And so to the House of Commons, to celebrate International Women’s Day with the Plan team, assorted MPs, the Royal African Society and Plan’s supporters.

On the way there,  I read the Mirror’s IWD supplement,  guest edited by Sarah Brown; on the way home, I saw that President Obama had also celebrated IWD at the White House; both huge, mainstream improvements on the way in which IWD is now globally recognised and acknowledged.

Chaired by Labour MP Sally Keeble, the event was about celebrating IWD, discussing women’s issues in Africa and highlighting the impact of women on economic empowerment. I sat at the back of the room and scribbled,  so saw a lot of backs rather than the speakers and their associated slides – but here’s what I heard …

Plan CEO Marie Staunton (a really fabulous speaker and such an impassioned advocate for girls and women) opened up the debate with the statement that “Girls are invisible” – their work is unseen, taken for granted, doesn’t count,  doesn’t contribute to GDP – and yet where would many societies be without it? And, in a recession,  girls suffer more than boys: they are more likely to be pulled out of school early in order to contribute to the family income,  with all the future repercussions of that (outlined here,  at the launch of Plan’s “Because I am a Girl” book in January). 

But,  continued Marie, each year of completed primary school  adds an additional 10% onto an adult girl’s future earnings; and girls who go on to complete a full ten years’ worth of education are more likely to have smaller families and break the cycle of poverty.  Plan are tracking 142 girls in 9 countries and these preliminary findings add a huge amount of value to their work overseas, as do insights such as learning that girls who are menstruating and have no sanitary protection can’t go to school – so something as relatively simple as providing them with sanitary towels can have a massive impact on their capacity to gain an education, recognise their rights, gain a voice and empower their communities.

A speaker (I unfortunately missed her name – Tipi …?) from Comic Relief told us that the charity has a specific programme funding women and girls, and that their research has shown that,  “when women and girls prosper, communities thrive.”

Focussing on education, anti-violence campaigns and women’s issues (such as programmes which emphasise the benefits of later marriage) all support the wider community in countries all over Africa and elsewhere.

Finally,  we were joined by two amazing girls from a Walthamstow secondary school – Rhiannon and Ronan.  They had won an essay competition and had,  as their prize,  spent the recent half-term holiday with Plan in Ghana, helping to raise awareness of the issues which affect girls’ education. These two 15 years old blew me away – so confident,  self-assured, witty, compassionate.  It’s no small thing to stand up in front of a room full of “grown ups” and talk about your recent trip – and yet they did,  and were amazing. 

“Boys are prioritised in Ghana”,  they announced.

“Girls are expected to help at home rather than go to school.”

As honoured guests of a high school near Accra, our girls presented the prizes on school sports day – which, as they told us to laughter and applause,  also consisted of handing over boxes of “Always” to the winning girls’ teams.

(“What are ‘always’?” – asked the man standing next to me … and then rather looked as if he hadn’t when he received the hissed answer of “Sanitary towels!”).

I loved these girls; as a member of the Plan team said to me afterwards: “Young voices are so important – not only do they talk sense but they capture an audience …” 

Anyway,  R & R were accompanied by a Guardian journalist;  read more about their adventures here.

Elswhere,  I’ve had a couple of comments made to me as to the “need” to have an International Women’s Day in 2010; to those people,  I’d refer you to the just-released World Economic Forum’s annual Corporate Gender Gap report,  which shows that,  even in countries such as the US,  where awareness and resources are far higher,  the numbers of women in the workforce at all are not,  actually,  that high – and as for India? 

(My use of bold)

Taken from the press release ,  we can see that:

The United States (52%), Spain (48%), Canada (46%) and Finland (44%) have the highest percentage of women employees at all levels among the responding companies. India is the country with the lowest percentage of women employees (23%), followed by Japan (24%), Turkey (26%) and Austria (29%). At the industry level, the findings of the survey confirm that the services sector employs the greatest percentage of women employees. Within this sector, the financial services and insurance (60%), professional services (56%) and media and entertainment (42%) industries employ the greatest percentage of women. The sectors that display the lowest percentage of women in the 20 economies are automotive (18%), mining (18%) and agriculture (21%).

Female employees tend to be concentrated in entry or middle level positions and remain scarce in senior management or board positions in most countries and industries. A major exception to this trend is Norway, where the percentage of women among boards of directors is above 40% for the majority of respondents. This is due to a government regulation that mandates a minimum of 40% of each gender on the boards of public companies.

The average for women holding the CEO-level position was a little less than 5% among the 600 companies surveyed. Finland (13%), Norway (12%), Turkey (12%), Italy (11%) and Brazil (11%) have the highest percentage of women CEOs in this sample.

But,  in Norway,  where there’s been a mandated quota system for a couple of years now, we see a more marked shift,  which leaves me wondering why so many countries (and companies) run scared of interventions such as quotas and targets.  There’s more on this in a political context on my friend Lee Chalmers’ excellent blog.  And Lee also links to and comments on the recent Economist article on gendercide … read this and then make the case that we no longer have a need for International Women’s Day, OK?

Happy St David’s Day – and, to those in India, Happy Holi!

What a week.

Monday: in Goa, wearing flip-flops, SPF40 and a big hat.

Wednesday: back in London, clad in corporate attire, feeling extremely chilly – and attending a big corporate LGBT bash at British Telecom’s offices near St Paul’s.

The event, chaired by the rather fabulous Michelle Bridgman (a nose at her website confirmed what I suspected on the day – she’s done a lot of stand up comedy: “Are there any straight people here? We’ll start a support group for you if so …”) was to promote LGBT History Month, which is celebrated in the UK each February, and it was also the launch of the new ILGA  website.

ILGA is the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans & Intersex Association which was born in 1978 out of a grass roots movement aimed at, as the co-Secretary General Renato Sabbadini explained, creating global change and awareness of the issues facing the LGBT community. They campaign on the two main pillars of homophobia – law and culture – and Renato hopes that their new interactive website will support their work.

As recently as 2007, homosexuality was de-criminalised in India (where BT has several major call centres), but that still leaves eighty countries in which it remains a criminal act, and a shocking FIVE in which it is punishable by death. And, to their huge credit, BT partners with ILGA and provides them with hosting and technology solutions, such as the new ILGA website; click on the link and take a look.

It’s a new tool, (accessible in French, Spanish and Portuguese as well as English) which informs people of their rights and their risks when travelling – and as such serves as a wonderful (and timely) resource for both employers and individuals. Last year, for example, I took a call from a US based gay colleague who was considering taking an overseas assignment in Singapore and who wanted to obtain the name and contact details of the co-worker who ran that office’s LGBT network. In Singapore, the punishment for being gay is life imprisonment and so of course our (then) mutual employer didn’t have a gay network; I would have found it very useful with my global diversity hat on to be able to direct my co-workers to such a site, and to ensure that my colleagues in the global mobility team were both aware of it as a resource and also had a nodding acquaintance with the issues facing our LGBT colleagues outside countries such as the US and UK.

One of the senior BT developers who worked on the site asked us to imagine how it might feel to be a gay or lesbian member of staff who wasn’t “out” to their manager and who was asked by their employer to go to a country on assignment or on a business trip where their sexuality could put them at risk – how do you, as a gay employee, have that conversation if you don’t have the information to hand which informs both you and your employer of exactly what you could be facing? And how can a manager make appropriate resourcing and deployment issues about their staff without having an up to date awareness of the risks (both potential and actual) in the countries in which the company has a presence?

Thus, on ILGA’s home page you can see a map of the world, into which you can drill via a variety of datasets (for example, female to female relationships, or age of consent laws) and then see how the map changes colour based on the legal status of that situation: so we can see that it’s illegal to be a lesbian in Algeria and Pakistan for example, legal in many other countries and “legal only in some areas” in Nigeria. You can also click on (or search for) a specific country of interest and see what the story is with regard to the law there; I clicked on India where I read about the legal background, anti-discrimination laws, asylum and immigration issues and social climate. There’s also an interactive section, aimed at mimicking the social networking component of sites such as Trip Advisor, where users are encouraged to post their stories of life in and/or visits to various countries, to enable others to gauge the mood and “gay friendliness” (or otherwise) of hotels, bars, restaurants and the country and people in general.

I was hugely impressed by both the site as a resource and also by BT’s support for ILGA. Although a lot of corporate support in the diversity space often is about chucking money at a cause or a group (and thank goodness for that), I think it does BT great credit that they’ve done so much more than that in this instance – they’ve put their massive technical and intellectual expertise to work to support this great cause and provided a genuinely useful tool which could really make a difference to both their own staff and to LGBT people worldwide. The site is so easy to use that I was readily able to demo it to a friend after the event and we were amazed at the wealth of information available; it’s clearly been an enormous project and hopefully will have an even more significant impact both as an information source but also as a risk awareness and a consciousness raising tool.

Loving your work, British Telecom.

Rainbow House (RH) is El Shaddai’s residential home for girls aged 8-13 (when they’re aged 2-7, they live next door, at House of Kathleen, and there are two similar homes in the area for boys) and is currently home to 51 girls, including my sponsored “daughter” Renuka. The children sleep in bunk-bedded dormitories and are cared for by four full time staff plus Stella,  the manager.

(One thing I always have to remember when thinking about what to buy Renuka is that each child has relatively little private space in which to store things;  they each have a small, cube shaped locker and access to a hanging rail for their clothes,  and that’s it).

The children are organised into groups and Stella tells me that this is to help to teach them teamwork, responsibility and leadership. The teams are named Love, Joy, Peace and Kindness and each team has a colour which they then wear as part of their school uniform.  Renuka is in the “Love” group and their colour is red,  so she wears a red polo shirt for school and always tries to choose red clothes from the communal pile in her dormitory.  Most recently, I’ve seen her in a red Bayern Munich t-shirt and a red swimsuit bearing the Welsh flag …

Part of the way in which the charity aims to teach responsibility is by making the children part of the routine of the home; for them,  it’s more than just a boarding school environment – they are part of the very fabric of the place. And they have a long and busy day,  Monday to Friday: this is their daily routine irrespective of age.

5.45am                        Alarm call and wake up.

6.00am                        Morning prayers; apparently, these are non-denominational and mostly consist of saying “thank you” to an unnamed god or presence.

6.15 – 7am                  “Duty” – this means undertaking chores of various sorts: cooking, cleaning, laundry and so on. Each group is part of a rota and will do different things each week; one evening when I visited,  Renuka emerged from the kitchen covered in flour, as the Love group had evening duty – making chapattis.

7.00 – 7.30am             Breakfast – as prepared by that day’s duty team, who will also have organised the tiffin (lunch) tins too.

7.30 – 8.30am             Wash and dress for school; the uniform is either a pleated skirt or shorts,  topped off with an appropriately coloured polo shirt, and sandals.

8.30 – 8.45am             Medicine: many of the children have ongoing medical issues due to their previous itinerant lifestyles and poor nutrition,  so Stella lines them up at this time and gives them their medications.

8.45am                        Uniform check: are you neat and tidy? Is your hair brushed? Then off you go to school! The children travel by mini-bus, as donated by a British based charity.

9.00 – 4.30pm             At El Shaddai’s own private Shanti Niketan school,  the children are organised into groups on the basis of ability rather than age – so Renuka,  for example, aged 9 and good at maths,  is in a class with children of 12, 13 and 14. All lessons are taught in English,  which is the common language; the children end up in Goa from all over India and many have other languages as their first tongue,  but school work is always done in English. 

At 12 noon,  they break for lunch,  which they eat, seated, from the tiffin tins.

5.00 – 7.00pm             The children arrive back at RH and evening duty commences for the relevant team.  This is also visiting time for sponsors and interested tourists,  so there’s always a stream of people calling into both RH and HoK, sitting on the veranda and playing with the children.

7.00 – 7.30pm             Prayers, followed by dinner.  This is usually vegetarian food (rice and dal, or a vegetable pullao) but they have meat once a week for those who eat it. They sometimes also have laddu, a very sweet Indian pudding; Renuka told me proudly that she is “the very best” at making this.    

7.30 – 8.00pm            More duty – washing up!

8.00pm                        Homework

9.00pm                        Bedtime; lights out by 10.30pm.

At the weekends,  the regime is a little more relaxed,  although the children still have “duty” in the morning; yesterday,  they were washing sheets.  However,  in the afternoon,  it’s the highlight of the week,  when they all pile into the mini-bus for a trip to the beach; they absolutely love this and it’s truly wonderful to see them have a chance to be children.

El Shaddai set up camp on the beach, and,  with a great flair for strategy, take the charity to the people. They have very cleverly realised that the children are their best ambassadors and so simply seeing the kids playing on the beach and splashing in the sea (as opposed to begging or selling jewellery) can give people an awareness of how different life can be with the assistance of ES and other charities.

The afternoon follows a loose structure. Having blown up numerous pairs of armbands and rubber rings, we all charge into the sea and play in the waves (at one point,  I had three small girls hanging off each of my arms). Then it’s out onto the sand for a bit,  with some organised races (relay running,  bunny hopping and so on) and a sand castle building competition. 

The staff then chop up some of the huge pile of fruit donated by the visitors and the children dig in to slices of pineapple and chunks of watermelon;  there’s usually so much left that all four homes can have fruit for the rest of the week.

I was particularly pleased to see so many men joining in and playing with the kids,  as these children really need strong male role models; many of them have been abandoned by their fathers,  or mistreated, victims of neglect, violence and alcohol. And whilst they don’t lack for love and care from the (mostly female) ES staff,  there are fewer men around to provide an alternative view of masculinity,  so the work that these guys do is hugely important, I think,  for both boys and girls. They need to know and see that men can be kind, gentle, playful and fun – all qualities in great abundance at the beach.

Finally,  it’s one last play in the sea – much shrieking of “the big wave! The big wave!!” – before we get dressed, pack up toys, equipment, leaflets, banners and fruit and return back home.

Great fun – and I get to do it all over again today.  I had planned to pack to come home,  but Renuka had remembered that my flight back is actually on Monday and so could see no valid reason at all why I shouldn’t come to the beach on Sunday … so that’s where I’ll be.  Can’t wait.

- but here’s an anecdote anyway,  which I think somewhat bears out my theory that the begging culture here is supported by western tourists.

I was in a beach front restaurant yesterday where, by chance, I was the only such tourist sitting at the front, overlooking the beach.

In the 90 minutes that I was there, I was the focus of a variety of beggars – the elderly, the infirm, women holding babies – who all asked me for money and occasionally prodded me with a sharp, insistent finger – but who resolutely ignored the Indian customers (who, it must be said, also ignored them with notable consistency).  I also noticed that we had no child performers while I was there – perhaps they took a look and decided it wasn’t worth their while given the demographics.

Proof of learned behaviour? I think so.  Why waste your time with the people who you know won’t chuck a few rupees your way,  when you can instead focus on the visitors who’ve been proven in the past to be a soft touch?

My lovely Goan taxi driver, Satish,  is now so on-board with the type of people related images which interest me when we’re out and about that he often spots them first (usually because I’ve got my eyes clamped shut) when we’re bombing along – and then screeches to a halt.

“Cleo Madam! Good picture for you here!”

And here’s one such example,  spotted earlier this week. It’s part of a nationwide campaign to persuade families of the value of having baby girls, in an attempt to reduce family sizes and prevent gender selective abortion or post-natal infanticide.  

The fine in question is huge: it represents c. £1400, which in a society where a working man can earn and raise a family on £40 per month,  is an almost unimaginable sum.

I’d love to know what statistics, if any,  exist to indicate the success of this campaign;  Satish tells me it’s been running for quite some time.

I went to Anjuna market again today – not particularly to shop (there are only so many sarongs, pashminas and necklaces that one woman needs) but to say hello to the El Shaddai team, drop off my used paperbacks for their bookstall,  soak up the atmosphere and take photos.

I travelled via boat – not an experience that I’d recommend or will be repeating.  It was a small,  six seater boat with an outboard motor, piloted by two psychotics who thought it was fun to gun the boat into 20’ high waves. To be fair,  there were five other people in the boat with me – young “up for it” Russian tourists who loved it; cue much screaming and arm waving as if we were at Big Splash Mountain (or whatever it’s called).  The journey is only a mile or so,  but it took twenty minutes,  due to all of this water based chicanery.

So of course,  we arrived at the market completely soaked – I was absolutely sodden from head to toe, hair to flip-flops, and staggered up the beach as if I were re-enacting the Normandy landings.

To continue the analogy, I then had to fight them on the beaches and fend off the ministrations of the hawk-eyed female beach sellers,  who take up residence on a rock and wait for soaked tourists to drag themselves ashore.

“Hello madam! Oh you are so very wet. Come, come, I help you get dry.  Come to my shop [stall], relax, buy lovely new dry clothes.  My name is Nikita,  what is you? Where you from, how many children you have?”

Etc.

However, the amount of child beggars and performers at the market continues to depress me;  apparently,  people travel from all over western India to participate in this huge orgy of tourism,  and that includes children.

At the market this morning,  I witnessed tiny children performing on a tightrope in front of a paparazzi like array of camera and camcorder wielding western tourists, who then filled the begging bowl which was passed around by the adult ringmaster.

(For obvious reasons … I don’t have any photographs of this event – I actually felt so nauseated by it that I couldn’t bring myself to be part of the throng – but here are, I assume,  the parents,  setting up the tightrope first thing).

What do these visitors think when they get home and show their friends and family that film footage of a tiny child,  perhaps five years old,  balancing on a tightrope – how cute? Isn’t she clever?

Or: “why isn’t she at school?” Or: “what future can she ever have if this is how she spends her time as a child?”

This week,  there are more Western children than usual in evidence,  as it’s the British school holidays, and so the contrast between the children that one sees is particularly pronounced – some are in Ben 10 t-shirts and are on holiday with their parents … others are working or begging,  or both. I was staggered (and disgusted) to see one tourist filming the child performers and then sending his seven-year old son down to the beach to pay the children – with no apparent sense of the irony of this act,  as far as I could see.

Goa seems to be such an economic magnet to so many people from other India states,  particularly Karnataka.  If western tourists stopped making it appear to be so economically advantageous to be either a child who begs or to have a child who you can send out to perform (thus making your child a resource) then perhaps the influx would cease or at least slow down?

I truly believe that every time a tourist gives a child money,  be it for either begging or performing,  they reinforce the notion (to both child and adult) that begging is an economically viable way of spending time and that it is,  in every sense of the word, “worth” it to be on the beach or at the market rather than at school.

The Goans are constantly telling me that their state’s infrastructure (water supplies, electricity, the road system, food supplies, accommodation) can’t cope with this influx of workers from other states and that the Goans disapprove of the children who beg – but yet I don’t see any evidence of the powers that be challenging it – for example,  policing child beggars/performers and/or the adults who visibly control them.

I think I need to go back to Rainbow House again tonight (I’ve been going to see Renuka every few days) in order to remind myself that there is another way and that it’s possible, through the work of El Shaddai and other charities, for children in Goa to have a different, brighter, more hopeful future.

This is Chandra.  Aged 24, she works on the beach, providing sun lounger based body massages to tourists.  I first got to know her last November,  when she was shadowing her older sister and learning how to give a massage. It’s a popular career option here in Goa;  you learn from another woman and the only investment you need to make is in a large bottle of coconut oil (about 10p) and a flannel with which to remove the sand from your clients’ feet.

At that point, her sister Geetha (aged 37) was the Queen of the Sun Lounger and ruled her section of the beach with a rod of iron.  Geetha had been providing massages for 12 years and charged 500 rupees (c. £6.50) for an hour;  while she slapped the westerners around with coconut oil,  Chandra would crouch at the end of the sun lounger,  watching,  learning and occasionally making herself useful by fetching drinks from the nearby beach shack or adjusting an umbrella.  The beach shack owner paid her around £3.50 per day for helping out. 

On a good day,  Geetha would do 10-12 massages and refused absolutely to allow herself to be bargained down on price or to comply with requests,  usually,  so I was told, from male Russian tourists,  for a massage “around the side” – a euphemism for a “private” massage undertaken without swimwear.  I learned all this at the time and was impressed by her strength of personality and awareness of her own value.

When I came back this year,  there was no sign of Geetha and Chandra appeared to have graduated to Masseuse. When I asked after her sister,  she told me that Geetha has returned to Karnataka in order to have her 7^th child; I was very surprised,  as I’d had no idea that she was pregnant,  but Chandra just shrugged and said “she hide it in sari”. Chandra told me that Geetha would be returning to Goa next November when the 2010/2011 season starts and was keen to retain her pitch on that bit of beach,  so they had agreed between them that Chandra would take over between Christmas and March – providing maternity cover,  I suppose.  

Of course,  Chandra lacks Geetha’s expertise,  so she charges a little less (£5) and is also much less busy – yesterday she did three massages; today, only one.  She manages to keep up with her shack based duties so she does earn that money as her basic wage,  but she’s clearly worried about cash.  Unlike Geetha,  she has more time to chat and is grateful to sit next to a friendly face and talk,  especially if you buy her a Coke or a bottle of water, or both.

Chandra can’t read or write and never went to school;  she has learned (quite good) English and some Russian from working on the beach for the last 8 years. She told me that she and Geetha are the top and tail end of a family of 8 children – Geetha’s the oldest, Chandra is the baby. She also told me that her father drank; he  died when she was 13, leaving Chandra,  the only child still living with her parents, and her mother, virtually destitute.  To help the family finances,  Chandra married aged 14 and went to live,  as is the custom,  with her husband’s family. Shortly afterwards,  her mother moved to Mumbai to live with a cousin and find work and Chandra hasn’t since seen her.  She had her first baby aged 15 and now has three children – two girls and a boy.

She is extremely proud that her children go to school and can read and write;  she wants them all to stay at school until they are at least 16 and to then get good jobs – “never ever work on beach,  not be like me!” she said, with great passion and fervour.

Each October, Chandra and her husband leave their children with his parents and take an 18 hour bus journey from Karnataka to Goa. They rent a room in a village about 5 miles inland and live there until early April. Chandra’s husband works in a clothes shop in the nearby resort of Calangute and seems to keep her on a tight rein; he calls her several times a day to see how much money she’s made and she has told me that he’s “not a good man”. One day, she had a black eye; he’d hit her the night before when she returned home with one thousand rupees (about £13.00) less than she’d previously told him she’d earned;  she thinks that she lost the money from her waist purse when she opened it and the wind blew the notes away.  Like her father (in fact,  like many men, according to other stories I’ve heard here), he drinks and,  in that regard, Chandra is happy that her children are away from him for half the year,  as she tells me that her in-laws are “very good people”.

Back in Karnataka, Chandra doesn’t work and told me that she enjoys being at home with her mother-in-law, cooking and cleaning. Her husband takes work on a day to day basis as a labourer and she says that they rely on their savings from Goa to tide them through between April and October, as sometimes her husband will only work for a few days each week,  or not at all.

Goa is full of Chandras, Geethas and women like them; just another aspect of the prism of womanhood in this vast, mysterious country.

I’ve written before about the number of children I see at the beach – not messing about with buckets and spades or paddling,  but actually working: selling crisps, jewellery, trinkets, performing, begging.

This upsets me terribly,  as does seeing other tourists be,  as I see it,  part of the problem, in that their handing over a few rupees here and there contributes to the concept of children (and their connected adults) viewing the beach as an economic opportunity.

However, this weekend I saw some children from the El Shaddai homes,  who came to “my” bit of the beach and,  as you can see here,  had a fabulous time:

It so wonderful to see children behaving as children should – messing about and playing.